Archive for the ·

Code

· Category...

Doom running in your browser

no comments

Christmas comes, but once a year…. Kongregate have recompiled Doom 1 in Flash, from the original source code. Since it’s from the original source, it plays just like the original, right down to the old cheat codes: in case you’ve forgotten, IDDQD activates “degreelessness” and IDKFA will enable all weapons, keys, and ammo, and boost your armor to 200%. Not that I’m saying you’ll need to cheat…..

You’ll need Flash 10 to play, and a non-PowerPC computer to run it.

Greasefire Finds Greasemonkey Scripts for the Site You’re Visiting

no comments

One of the problems with using the Greasemonkey extension for firefox is knowing what scripts are available for the site you are visiting. Greasefire is a companion extension designed to help you customize your web browsing by finding user scripts for any page you’re currently visiting.
Once installed, the extension automatically searches the Greasemonkey script repository Userscripts.org for scripts related to the site you’re visiting. If a script is available, the Greasemonkey icon in your Firefox status bar will display a fiery background to indicate that it found matches.

Fixing IE6 CSS Support

no comments

From 24 ways to impress your firends:

It is the destiny of one browser to serve as the nemesis of web developers everywhere. At the birth of the Web Standards movement, that role was played by Netscape Navigator 4; an outdated browser that refused to die. Its tenacious existence hampered the adoption of modern standards. Today that role is played by Internet Explorer 6.

………

JavaScript genius Dean Edwards wrote a script called IE7. This amazing piece of code uses JavaScript to make Internet Explorer 5 and 6 behave like a standards-compliant browser. Dean used JavaScript to bootstrap IE’s CSS support.

Because the script is specifically targeted at Internet Explorer, there’s no point in serving it up to other browsers. Conditional comments to the rescue:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script src="http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/version/2.0(beta3)/IE7.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<![endif]-->

Standards-compliant browsers won’t fetch the script. Users of IE6, on the hand, will pay a kind of bad browser tax by having to download the JavaScript file.

Circumventing Internet Censorship #1

no comments

AlwaysVPN, a free virtual private networking service, is promoted as a way for anyone to browse the web or trading files over a public net connection. And, by the way, it also lets anyone on the outside of a U.S.-only service like Hulu or Pandora get around that often arbitrary restriction.
Hotspot Shield is a similar service, but AlwaysVPN has the edge in not installing any toolbars (although it does put ads across the top of your browser), working on all three major platforms, and, according to lifehacker, having better performance.

AlwaysVPN is a free download, and installation and startup of AlwaysVPN is a simple right-click affair in Windows, but OS X users will have to configure a third-party VPN client, and Linux users will have to compile from source.

Related Links:
Response to “Christian Lobby Welcomes ISP Filtering Moves”

Converting MP4 to MP3

1 comment

I know there’s a lot of sites (like vidtomp3) that let you extract music from online videos. But what if you already have the video (in my case, some *.mp4 files) on hand ?

Converting MP4 files to MP3 is quite easy, once you have appropriate software. I used google to find the free version of NCH Software’s Switch Audio File Conversion (this is provided free as a teaser for Switch Plus – you can download Switch Plus demo here or purchase Switch Plus online here).



The options are laid out very simply, but are comprehensive enough for me. You can can control

  • whether you’re converting an entire folder or just a bunch of files,
  • your output bitrate,
  • the location of the output files …

It may be a basic program by true audio engineer standards, but it meets my (9albeit simple) requirenments.

Why does Software Piracy hurt FOSS ?

1 comment

jason stirk tweeted about an interesting article about the interaction and semantics, I suppose, of Usage and Piracy of Software, and it’s effect on Open Source Software.

The point to draw from it is that software piracy, while not giving cash to the software company, still provides support for them. The example used in the Adobe Photoshop range of products.

…even if something better becomes available, people will still be using Adobe, because it’s the industry’s standard. Most of my student friends were using pirated versions of Photoshop at home because they couldn’t afford the real thing, and because it was what they were learning to use in class. I showed a few of them the benefits of using GIMP instead, and the response was total rejection of GIMP. It was unfamiliar, it had no perceived benefits over Photoshop, and most of all, it wasn’t even any cheaper than a pirated version of Photoshop.

Bluntly, if you download a pirated copy of MS-Office instead of Open Office, then OOo’s developers have lost a user, lost a supporter (and possibly, lost a contributor), and you are reinforcing the Microsoft hold on Office Software.

CSS and Printing

no comments

CSS allows you to create multiple styles styles for a single page or document. This is how WordPress themes are implemented. You can see it at work in the last.fm paint it black or simply red screen formats. Developers are used to styling for the screen. However, using it on other media STILL isn’t a habit yet. The result is that, for many developers, our thinking about printing or about displaying on mobile devices has been limited to recreating a document in a different way.

Why bother, when the power to offer your readers a more appropriate view of your material is no further away than a well-structured document and a media-specific style sheet?

You can take any (X)HTML document and simply style it for print or iphone or other mobile device out having to touch the markup. Worries about version skew between the web and print versions suddenly become a thing of the past. Best of all, it’s simple to do.

Here’s a link to an article by Eric Myer on CSS Printing. And to make it even more user friendly, take a look at this one that uses a printer preview to let the user see what they’ll get.

RSS Feeds for Yahoo! Search Results

1 comment

Listed below are the different feed addresses for Yahoo! – just replace keyword with your own search query or phrase before subscribing to that feed.

Web Search:
http://search.yahooapis.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml? appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=keyword

Videos:
http://search.yahooapis.com/VideoSearchService/rss/videoSearch.xml? appid=ysearchblog&format=mpeg&query=keyword

Images:
http://search.yahooapis.com/ImageSearchService/rss/imageSearch.xml? appid=yahoosearchimagerss&query=keyword

Yahoo! News:
http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=keyword

The images and video clips are available as media enclosures in the RSS feed so you can directly download them locally via any pod-catcher or your news reader itself. These feeds are also useful for SEO folks, to let them track new web pages that may creep up in Yahoo! search results for keywords of their clients or even for checking penalties.

Useability: Linux / Unix v Closed Software

no comments

A tweet from Linda Eastin pointed me at this old blog entry from Daring Fireball on Linux and Spray-on Useability, that takes aim at the Eric Raymond rant on Linux usability (the one where he can’t get CUPS working).

There’s an old engineering adage: “Fast, good, cheap: pick two.” (Where
“fast” regards development time, not performance.) Desktop Linux
software is cheap (free) and fast (release early, release often), but
it’s not good.

Or, perhaps one could argue that it is cheap, and eventually it’s going
to be good, but it’s getting there very slowly.

Windows and Mac OS, on the other hand, are fast and good. For the sake
of this discussion, it doesn’t matter which is better and which is
improving faster. What matters is that neither is cheap. It’s very
difficult to beat the fast/good/cheap rule.

For example, look at how much Mac OS X has improved in the last three
years alone. Even if desktop Linux is improving — and I do think it is
— it’s improving at a much slower pace than Mac OS X.

…..

More often than not, you get what you pay for.

Export the Feeds from a Google Reader Folder

no comments

Most feed readers let you import and export subscriptions using the OPML format. For Google Reader, you find this option in Settings > Import/Export. But what happens if you want to export the feeds from a single folder so you can share them with a friend or upload them to a site? Google Reader lets you export the feeds from a Public folder:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/USERID/label/FOLDER i.e. http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/00907783891347362261/label/humour (you should replace USERID with the appropriate userid number and FOLDER with the actual name of the folder)

This can also be used if someone shares a folder with you and you want to obtain the list of subscriptions from that folder. If someone shares a folder:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/13577231804381328821/label/googlers, then you can easily obtain the link to the corresponding OPML file by replacing shared with public/subscriptions i.e. http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/13577231804381328821/label/googlers